Eugene H. Peterson Quotes
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Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.
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Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.
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Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.
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I get asked, 'What do you miss most about being a pastor?' I think it's the intimacy, the incredible gift of intimacy. You go through death with somebody, with their families, and there's an intimacy that comes through that that is just incomparable.
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Waiting means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.
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Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.
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We've all met a certain type of spiritual person. She's a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She's not a selfish person. But she's always at the center of everything she's doing.
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The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, 'Let us worship God.' If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor.
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O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.
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Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?
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The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.
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There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
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Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
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When you are part of a megachurch you have no responsibility to anybody else.
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You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.
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Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be - you get a fresh start, your slate's wiped clean. Count yourself lucky - God holds nothing against you and you're holding nothing back from Him.
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If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
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Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.
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It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.
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I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.
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Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . It is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality . . . a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.
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Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.
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It's essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory. Art is the primary way in which this happens. It's the primary way in which we become what we see or hear.
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Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.